Pay Per Click Management
What Is Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
Pay Per Click(PPC) campaigns are without doubt extremely easy to set up; even with the minimum of IT skills, you can be online within minutes making your first sales. But… Be Warned…with simplicity comes consequences and these can end up COSTING YOU MONEY!
Pay-per-click (PPC), also known as cost per click (CPC), is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher (typically a website owner or a network of websites) when the ad is clicked.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is, without doubt, the quickest way to drive traffic to your site and as such must be considered as an approach that will potentially work hand in glove with SEO techniques. There are several pay per click search engines but the main and most popular still seems to be Google via their easy to use Adwords facility.
The theory behind the success of all of the major search engines offering PPC historically was simple, the person who placed the largest bid for any key term would have their ad positioned at the top of the sponsored links and thus receive most traffic. This all changed when Google introduced their improved pay-per-click program Ad rank, an algorithm that bases your ad’s placement on bid amount, and a quality score that’s based on ad relevance, landing page relevance, and click-through-rate. This was a major change which meant that a company wishing now to rank high not only had to think about their budget but also give consideration to page content and relevance.
An Effective Well Managed PPC Campaign Will:
Pay Per Click (PPC) Strategy
NetTonic do not believe that one size fits all; every client will have individual needs so during our initial consultation we will aim to gain a thorough understanding of your organisation. There will be a requirement to provide us with access to your current Adwords/analytics accounts for us to gain historical information such as conversion data, cost per acquisition, revenue generated etc…
An initial campaign audit is essential as not only does it establish a point in time which future success will be measured against but it also identifies areas where we can best save you money.
-
- Keyword Analyses – Are you making sure your keywords are generating relevant traffic? Most of the time advertisers are investing money on terms that are just not good enough or not 100 percent relevant. Spotting these terms can save you a lot of money.
- Location Targeting – Are you getting clicks from locations you don’t want to target
- Quality Score – Are your campaigns Google-approved? High Quality Scores have a major impact on your ROI, improving your rankings and lowering your costs.
- Impression Share – How often do your ads appear as a result of relevant search queries? Increased impression share can improve exposure and multiply your lead generation results.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR) – CTR is a measure of how targeted your ads are. If your CTR is low, you may be losing ground to competing advertisers.
- Account Activity – To maintain performance, you need to spend active time in your account. How often are you checking under the hood?
- Long-Tail Keyword Optimization – Are you utilizing longer, more targeted keywords in your campaigns? If not, you’re missing opportunities to grab high-intent, low-cost traffic.
- Ad Text Optimization – Are you writing enough text ads to get strong performance in terms of impressions, clicks, CTR and ad ranking?
- Landing Page Optimisation – More landing pages usually means more targeted messaging. Do you have more or fewer landing pages than similar advertisers?
- Connection With Google Analytics – Make sure to have properly connected Google AdWords and Analytics because this can save you a lot of time and money!
- Mobile Advertising – With mobile traffic growing at 200% each year, it’s crucial to stay on top of mobile PPC best practices like call extensions, site links, and mobile-optimized text ads.
- PPC Best Practices – Are you adhering to the proven best practices that PPC experts follow to ensure optimal AdWords performance?
Keyword research – there is always room for improvement with keywords. There are often new words and verbiage being searched each and every day.
Figuring out how to stay ahead of the curve and find the right words is critical. There are many under-developed keywords in every industry. This means keywords that have a decent amount of traffic, but lack the tough competition that the mainstream keywords carry. Having the right keywords in place will also reduce your chance to have a missed opportunity.
- Seasonality Trends/Cyclical Trends – This is important information to consider as certain keywords have ties to the season. Some keywords are searched more often at certain times of the year, or in conjunction with promotions, or the news. It’s important to look at trending history and keyword search volume in times past.
- Negative keywords – Use “negative keywords” and your PPC profits can increase. This valuable technique tells Google which phrases your ad should not be displayed for. For example, if you’re selling brand new “apple laptops”, you don’t want your ad to appear when someone searches for “refurbished apple laptops”, so “refurbished” should be a negative keyword for your campaign. Identifying some of these keywords will make a difference.
- Match types of the keywords – there are 3 types of keyword matches you can select from Google: broad, “phrase”, and [exact]. Many searchers have different intentions with what they are looking for. By adding or changing the match type of the keyword you’re bidding on, you can narrow down your traffic for specific keywords and also reduce costs of unintended clicks.
Over time and with lots of experience, Nettonic.com has been able to successfully break down the bidding strategy for any keyword campaign into 4 broad categories. By knowing where you fit in and what your goals are will help to shape all other aspects the success of the PPC campaign. In order to run an effective PPC campaign it’s important to consider revenue, profits (gross and operating), value per click, and the incremental cost per click. The 4 categories are as follows:
- Budget Based – this strategy is based around getting the most amount of exposure/clicks for your dollar.
- Rank Based – This strategy is focused more on branding and positions than any other. This is the least effective cost based strategy and is used more to attract searchers who are looking for your company specifically. Many of the big box stores and well branded companies use this strategy to keep people coming to their website who search for them by name.…
- Conversion Based – This strategy is based upon increasing your click through rate and conversions based upon the keywords selected and the ads that are written without having specific ROI goals set into place.
- Return on Investment (ROI) Based – This is by and large the most popular strategy for many companies. This strategy focuses on the return on your ad spend and conversions with specific goals in place for conversions. Not always are your best performing (most clicked keywords) your best place to put your money. Often, it’s some of the least clicked keywords that will produce the highest ROI meaning you’ll get many more conversions per click on average than any other keyword/ad. The idea is to increase the budget to the keywords that perform well and reduce the budget towards the keywords that are not showing conversions, thus increasing the effectiveness of your budget.
PPC Campaign Setup and Development
Campaign Setup
At Nettonic we use several different pay-per-click (PPC) platforms to meet the unique needs of each of our clients. Incorporating multiple advertising campaigns across several platforms helps our customers maximize their reach.
Some of the PPC platforms we use at NetTonic include:
Google Adwords: The most used search engine worldwide (reaches about 65% of U.K. search engine users).
Microsoft Ad Centre: reaches about 22% of UK. search engine users (Ad Centre serves ads to both Bing and Yahoo users).
Facebook/LinkedIn: Focused Demographic targeting by: Location, Language, Education, Work, Age, Gender, Birthday, Relationship Status, Likes, and Interests. Use Facebook ads to: Grow your fan base, Drive Sales, or just build awareness.
NetTonic understand the importance of effectively structuring the PPC accounts we manage. If an account is not structured properly the ads shown may not be relevant, clicks may be missed, quality scores drop, duplicate keywords will compete, and keywords can become budget hogs.
All Adwords accounts are organized with three levels: account, campaign, and ad group. At each level, we manage separate functions of our clients advertising efforts:
Account level –Controls administrative information, such as account access and billing.
Campaign level –Specifies settings that apply to all ad groups within them. We set daily budgets, target languages and locations, start and end dates, and ad distribution preferences.
Ad group level –Contains keywords, ad text, placements (which websites the ads appear on), maximum cost-per-click bids, and landing page destination URLs.
Campaign Developement
- Identify Campaign Goals – Short-Term (1-12 Months) Long-Term (2-3 Years)
- Competitor Analysis – PPC Strategies, Conversion Strategies
- Industry Analysis – Trends, Changes, Search Behaviour
- Keyword Research – Keyword Selection, Bid Decisions, Negative Keyword Lists
- Demographic Research
- Account Structure – Campaigns, Adgroups
- Ad Development – Relevance, Value Propositions
- Products & Services – Identify, Prioritize, Keyword Match
- Identify Market Segments – Geography, Search Queries, Demographics
- Select Campaign Budgets
- Select Bid Strategy – Click-Driven, CPA-Driven, ROI-Driven, CPM-Driven
- On-Site Review – Landing Page Problems, Keyword Relevance, Sales Funnels, Conversion Strategies
- Conversion Code – Implementation, Testing
- Analytics Review
*The services listed above contain tasks that are typical for the service provided. The tasks above may not accurately reflect the services NetTonic will provide to your specific organisation. A custom strategy and task list will be created by your marketing specialist after the campaign development phase has been completed. Please refer to the list of tasks provided by your marketing specialist for your campaign’s specific statement of work
At NetTonic we use several different pay-per-click (PPC) platforms to meet the unique needs of each of our clients. Incorporating multiple advertising campaigns across several platforms helps our customers maximize their reach.
Some of the PPC platforms we use at NetTonic include:
Google Adwords: The most used search engine worldwide (reaches about 65% of U.K. search engine users).
Microsoft Ad Centre: reaches about 22% of UK. search engine users (Ad Centre serves ads to both Bing and Yahoo users).
Facebook/LinkedIn: Focused Demographic targeting by: Location, Language, Education, Work, Age, Gender, Birthday, Relationship Status, Likes, and Interests. Use Facebook ads to: Grow your fan base, Drive Sales, or just build awareness.
NetTonic understand the importance of effectively structuring the PPC accounts we manage. If an account is not structured properly the ads shown may not be relevant, clicks may be missed, quality scores drop, duplicate keywords will compete, and keywords can become budget hogs.
All Adwords accounts are organized with three levels: account, campaign, and ad group. At each level, we manage separate functions of our clients advertising efforts:
Account level –Controls administrative information, such as account access and billing.
Campaign level –Specifies settings that apply to all ad groups within them. We set daily budgets, target languages and locations, start and end dates, and ad distribution preferences.
Ad group level –Contains keywords, ad text, placements (which websites the ads appear on), maximum cost-per-click bids, and landing page destination URLs.
- Identify Campaign Goals – Short-Term (1-12 Months) Long-Term (2-3 Years)
- Competitor Analysis – PPC Strategies, Conversion Strategies
- Industry Analysis – Trends, Changes, Search Behaviour
- Keyword Research – Keyword Selection, Bid Decisions, Negative Keyword Lists
- Demographic Research
- Account Structure – Campaigns, Adgroups
- Ad Development – Relevance, Value Propositions
- Products & Services – Identify, Prioritize, Keyword Match
- Identify Market Segments – Geography, Search Queries, Demographics
- Select Campaign Budgets
- Select Bid Strategy – Click-Driven, CPA-Driven, ROI-Driven, CPM-Driven
- On-Site Review – Landing Page Problems, Keyword Relevance, Sales Funnels, Conversion Strategies
- Conversion Code – Implementation, Testing
- Analytics Review
*The services listed above contain tasks that are typical for the service provided. The tasks above may not accurately reflect the services NetTonic will provide to your specific organisation. A custom strategy and task list will be created by your marketing specialist after the campaign development phase has been completed. Please refer to the list of tasks provided by your marketing specialist for your campaign’s specific statement of work